


As We Fly Closer to the Sun

by oklles



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Anxiety/panic, Engineering, I also sprinkled in some greek mythology, M/M, Science Fiction, Wormholes, all science is based on real theory, and my two loves, black holes, cus why not, eridanus constellation, my biggest headcanon is that victor is obsessed with 80's pop songs, self-indulgent fic so I can talk about space basically, theoretical physics, this is a future fic and everybody is older
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-21
Updated: 2018-04-21
Packaged: 2019-04-25 20:57:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14386971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oklles/pseuds/oklles
Summary: Victor is a theoretical physicist haunted by a black hole he believes resides in the constellation of Eridanus. Yuuri is the rocket engineer who helps him find her.





	As We Fly Closer to the Sun

**Author's Note:**

> I started the creation of this story back in the beginning of February, and I'm so excited to finally share it! I want to thank [littorella](http://littorella.tumblr.com) and [infinitehearts](http://infinitehearts.tumblr.com) for being so amazing and helping me with all the editing♡ 
> 
> And please check out [this beautiful piece of art by littorella](https://katsuv.tumblr.com/post/173161301937/art-credit-to-littorella-for-creating-this) that she created to accompany my story!
> 
> I hope you guys enjoy!

_ He and I collided like two _

_ predestined stars and in that _

_ brief moment I felt what it _

_ was like to be immortal _

 

_ — Lang Leav _

 

 

Victor is five and it is his birthday. He blinks up at the darkened sky, ablaze with a color he cannot yet name. His mother stands behind him, crouched so her lips align perfectly with his ear and her hands placed on his shoulders - heavy like gravity, like he’s still learning to walk with his own weight. She points up to a mess of stars, the tip of her finger vague among them. 

“That is Eridanus,” she says, “And it is yours.”

Victor can hear the whistle of the tall grass around them, each strand’s posture bent with the force of the wind. It is here he can imagine, in the loneliness of it all, that beyond their atmosphere there is more than this.

“Your star is waiting for you there, Victor,” his mother tells him. “Amongst all that darkness, _ty svet_. Understand?”

It is as his mother takes his hand and separates his pointer finger, tracing it along the ghost of the constellation’s river, that he learns of his place in the world. Victor does not want to close his eyes, does not want to miss a moment of this - the sky churning invisible above them, the dirt beneath his shoes wet with the evening rain. He wonders if the ground remembers him the last time he had taken steps here - wonders if the imprint of that moment was buried somewhere in the undergrowth.

“Can I go to it?” Victor asks.

The question seems to startle her. “Go to what?”

“My star.”

His mother laughs, gentle like snowfall. “Perhaps in another life you will be able to.”

He doesn’t like this answer. “Then what will it give me now?”

“Perhaps that is something you could find out, no?” She smiles almost audibly before ruffling his hair. “Come, or we will never get to sleep.”

 

——

 

Victor is ten and all he wants is to look at the sun. He peeks into its brightness and waits until all he can see is white - the faintest outline of a circle chopped and stripped, partially erased by the radiation. When he can finally look away, it takes a full minute of blinking to return his vision. In that minute Victor could see the world differently - in shattered pieces, in glimpses and fragments - a glorified penumbra.

It is then he begins to see his shadow. His mother takes him to the eye doctor where he receives a prescription and a scolding - _Why would you stare into the sun, don’t you know that can make you blind?_ \- but the shadow does not go away. His mother says it is the clouds in his vision, caused by the heat of the sun.

“It is like something is missing,” she explains. “The sun has burned away a part of what connects all the pieces. They are just dark spots.”

“Why would it burn me when it is so far away?” Victor doesn’t know why he feels betrayed. He does not know the sun.

“The sun is the most powerful energy in all our solar system, Vitya.” She pushes his glasses until they hit the space between his eyes. “It is just doing what it knows how.”

But the shadow does not stand still, and Victor stops wearing his glasses on the third day. It is a presence almost, that follows him around - when he brushes his teeth, curls against the couch, takes the bus to school - and he does not feel afraid, but comforted.

The shadow sleeps with him at night, wakes him up in the new day. Victor wants nothing more than to find it, to understand it. When his mother falls ill the next winter, and he is standing next to a pit of black and dirt, he names it after her.

_Stella._

 

——

_Present day_

 

The world at night is a quiet chaos. Even in all of its silence, with all of its hues and bruises, Victor still wakes to an inconsolable darkness. It lurks beneath the heaviness of his eyelids, comes to rest in the breath of his pulse, and with a focused panic he blinks to find something - _anything_ \- in this room to pull him from it. 

The soft blue of the moon slips in through the cracks of his blinds, and there are spineless shadows creeping along the edges of his vision as he tries to focus on the beam - follows its journey along the whites of his walls before resting itself against the outline of his desk.

Victor releases his breath, his chest aching with exhaustion. He sags against his pillows, feels sweat trickle down the nape of his neck and into the collar of his shirt.

_I am here, and I am real._

He had dreamed of her again, beautiful and bright and _there_. She had engulfed all space between them, her orbit blanketed by impossible light. She had shown him every gradation of the sun, every wavelength of darkness, until her mouth had swelled up to consume him. Victor wonders if he should bring this up to his assigned psychiatrist at Roscosmos, or if it would just make him look as if he were slipping into madness.

Victor runs a hand down his face, his lungs gasping for air. Was it true he was slipping into madness already?

The cool air as he pushes back his sheets feels good against the sickly warmth pulsing under his skin. He peers over at the small clock beside his bed and rubs the sleep from his eyes. It was early still, he had knocked away a couple of hours at least. As he pushes himself to stand, legs unstable beneath the weight of his dreams, he wonders if that is all she will ever be to him.

The light from the bathroom nearly blinds him. His nose pinches together as he blinks against his own reflection, flashes of bruised eyes and the unruly tangle of his hair. He turns away, ignores the emptiness that pushes somewhere deep in his chest, and grabs for his gym bag.

The jog to Roscosmos is balanced by dim street lights and the steady fall of snow. The wind whistles against the tips of his ears, pushes hard against his shoulders. He welcomes the cold with each puff of breath, watches the mist pull from his mouth and curl back against his cheeks. He glances down, follows the footprints he leaves in the powder dusting itself against the sidewalk.

He goes through the standard procedure as he enters the government space - flashing his ID and a wide heart-shaped smile, the normal small talk with Jean in the surveillance booth - _Early morning again, Victor? Hey, you find whatever it is you’re looking for yet?_ \- before squeezing in through the double doors and heading towards the training gym.

He makes towards the same treadmill he always claims - there’s never anyone here this early anyway - but is stopped at the sight of long blond hair, bouncing against the beat playing softly overhead. The boy looks stoic as always, shoulders a sturdy cage, holding and binding in anything else that might sneak through. He’s wearing his red and blue national track suit, its white arms sagging against his thin frame.

“Shouldn’t you be asleep? Growing boys like you need all they can get.”

“You’re late.” The boy hits the red stop button, hopping off before the belt has even come to a full halt. He grabs the cheetah-print towel hanging off to the side. “Honestly not sure why you even left in the first place.”

“You know me, poor judgement and all that.” He flashes a smile, leaning back against the wall. “I thought maybe something would happen if I stopped watching.”

Soft eyes scan the facade of Victor’s face, almost as gentle as a touch. They’re stern when he connects their gaze. “Same dream?”

“Yuri.” Victor tries to keep his smile. “I don’t want - ”

“ - To talk about it, to burden me, blah blah.” Yuri rolls his eyes, throws his towel over one shoulder. “You say this every time, but I know you need to talk about it.”

Victor watches him quietly - the slant of his brow, the tense roll of his shoulders - before releasing a sigh. Even with all of his teen fury, Victor knows Yuri isn’t as strong as he seems. He’s changed in the years since joining at Roscosmos - still _impossible_ , sure, but gentler too. Three years ago he doesn’t think he would have ever expected to run here and find Yuri waiting for him.

“Yeah,” he murmurs in defeat, before pushing off the wall and motioning for Yuri to follow towards the organized weights at the opposite end of the room. He lets his eyes flicker, watches the shadow of Yuri’s presence behind him in the mirrors. “Same dream.”

Yuri doesn’t respond, just positions himself belly-down against the slanted arch of the ab machine. He barely exerts a breath as he begins to lift and fall, arms crossed behind his back. His eyes are hooded, masked by purple bruises and a pale, expressionless gaze. Victor can see himself in Yuri’s stare, can feel the same exhaustion weighing on his shoulders.

He settles down on the machine beside him, bracing himself against the soft padding. Yuri hits his set, slumping down and letting his fingers drag across the carpet. He draws lines in the gaps, long and slender. “Tell me of her again.”

What feels like another lifetime ago, Victor had made a decision to pursue the theory of his shadow. The Eridanus Supervoid was an untouched piece of space, an avoidance. Pushing his way through university his colleagues had been far more drawn to String Theory or Dark Energy, easily populated and accepted - or as accepted as any niche could possibly get in science.

But Eridanus had always burned somewhere in his chest, an echo of the shadow he had carried with him since childhood. He knew the drop in temperature that surrounded her constellation was not unexplainable, that something had pushed against Eridanus’ tide and opened her up over a billion light years wide. Victor dedicated his studies, his career, his _life_ to that theory - pushed through the multiverse and other alternate dimensions before settling on this - on _her_.

_Stella._

“In my dreams she is bright - alive.” He pushes his arms against his chest, pulling up against the mention of her presence before falling steadily back down. The burn in his abdomen is a steady reminder of reality. “Each time I’m only just hovering above her. I can see her in her entirety, somehow.”

Yuri huffs next to him. “Does she look like what we think, like in the pictures?”

Victor shakes his head, dropping his body to rest. “Some part of my subconscious constructs her that way, yes. I don’t know anything else. But sometimes she is just a halo of light - not even that, really - more of what I imagine quantum entanglement to look like should it have a projection.”

“Is that what you want, what you imagine? An entangled black hole?”

Victor rubs at his forehead, pushes his fingers back through the sweat in his fringe. “I want her to be a lot of things.”

He couldn’t even prove any of them, not yet, not until he could actually prove she existed in the first place. It was a small thought, one he had read about in articles, but had never been pushed to the forefront of physics. The multiverse was a much more colorful explanation.

It had made perfect sense to him really, the ways in which relativity had connected everything into such a simple, observable question. _If our galaxy orbits a supermassive black hole, do our galaxy clusters orbit one too?_

That was how relativity worked, how the understanding of the universe worked - through gravity. For any of this to have formed, there had to have been something pushing and pulling all the matter into shape.

“Victor.”

Yuri’s soft lull pulls him from his thoughts. He blinks, pushes himself up again to start his next set. He feels the burn in his abdomen spread this time, pulsing across his lower back. He huffs angrily, stopping to roll back onto his heels in a short stretch.

“Victor, what happens when you find her?”

“If.” He closes his eyes, breathes in through his nose. “ _If_ I find her.”

“Whatever.” Yuri shuffles beside him, can hear the sound of a zipper tense against its teeth.

Victor shrugs, turning to meet with Yuri’s stare. “Proving her existence would be enough.” A small part of him knows that even in all her grandeur, in all of her recognition, in all the changes she would bring to science, it would never be enough.

Yuri blinks at him before turning away with a sigh, fingers pulling at the loose fabric of his t-shirt as he stands. “I don’t know nearly enough about any of this.”

“I _try_ to teach you, I _asked_ to be your mentor - ”

Yuri snorts, turning and heading towards the water fountain to their left. “And what would that have made me? What kind of pilot takes under a physicist?”

“You have so much potential,” Victor calls after him. “You could be more than just a pilot.”

He watches the curve of the boys spine as he leans to drink from the steady stream of water, arm coming to wipe at the moisture left resting against his lips.

“What makes you think I want to be more than a pilot?”

Victor clicks his tongue in annoyance. “Otabek thinks you could do more too.”

Yuri whirls around, shoulders tense, fingers curling into fists. “He doesn’t - I don’t make _my_ choices based on Otabek.”

“He makes his for you.” Victor lets the corners of his lips curl up slightly, softly. “He followed you here, didn’t he?”

“I didn’t ask him to.”

Victor laughs. “That’s not how it works, you know.”

Yuri rubs angrily at his face, heated and blooming around Victor’s words. “Shut up, you’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

He puts his hands up in surrender, watches as Yuri stalks back towards him to grab his jacket off the floor. “My point is, you’re incredibly talented. I just wish you’d push yourself more.”

“Whatever.”

Victor worries sometimes about pushing Yuri’s boundaries, but he knows what it feels like to get lost - to feel settled even, in an uncomfortable balance of ignorance. By the time they’ve finished their session the sunrise has begun to filter in through the windows, dancing against its own reflection in the mirrors. People have begun to migrate steadily through the doors, murmured voices and excited Russian blending into the smell of sweat and rubber.

“Be safe,” Victor says to Yuri as they part for the showers. The younger boy just nods in confirmation before disappearing behind the exit.

 

——

 

Victor’s managed to fall asleep again. His eyes blink against the harsh light pouring in through the small window in his office, jaw slack where it rests against the wood of his desk. He groans, head pounding to the beat of Bon Jovi’s _Livin’ on a Prayer_ as it pours through his speakers harshly, far too loud for him to have lost consciousness. His eyes glance up at the small clock resting against the wall. He’d put away two more hours. 

As he becomes reacquainted with the blur of his surroundings, the slow ring of his intercom interrupts his 80’s playlist and stirs him from his awkward position. His fingers fumble against the answering machine beside him, heavy with dreams, before finally finding the right button.

Before he can even properly say hello, Yakov’s voice is bursting through, settling uncomfortably in his gut. “Where are you?”

Victor rubs at his eyes, his face, his hair. “In my office, trying to work.” He sighs against the lie. “Where else?”

He can hear voices in the background, loud and chaotic, and there is something off about the way Yakov completely ignores his bluff to press on. “What the hell are you doing there? As part of Roscosmos’ council, you should be _here_ , in my _office_.”

“What?” Victor is still in the throes of sleep and Yakov’s voice is more unpleasant than usual. “Can’t this wait till later? I was about to go through the data from VLT - ”

“We found her,” Yakov says, and for some reason Victor isn’t able to hear what comes after.

Panic pulses through his skin, the tips of his fingers numb where they grip against wood. He cannot feel his breath, can only hear it, empty and erratic, pounding against his ears as he drowns in the light clouding his eyes - a reflection of the sun, a pit of darkness, an unbearable beating organism as she reaches up again, opens her mouth to pull him in -

“Victor!” Yakov yells. “Are you even listening to me?”

“I - ” He chokes out, before pushing away from his desk and willing his legs out the door. He ignores the uncomfortable ache in his thighs, still sore from his morning work out, and follows the hallway towards Yakov’s office.

Victor had met Yakov back in university, young and open and eager. He had been his professor at St. Petersburg State, a stern and collected figure, his voice a constant release of space-time curvature and quantum theory. It had lit a fire deep in Victor’s chest, pulled him away from the deception of stars and into the hope for something more.

Yakov had taken to him easily, mentoring him both in and out of class, and it was easy to find purpose behind his leadership. Halfway through his graduate studies, Yakov had asked for Victor to join him at Roscosmos. Not even two years later he’d been asked to join the board under the agreement that he pursue Eridanus in all her forms, no matter the black hole residing at her edge. Whatever he found would be at the glory of Russia.

Victor slams through the doors leading to main control, lungs bursting as he watches the figures behind the connecting glass wall. They’re not moving as urgently as he had hoped or expected. He feels as though every cell in his body is multiplying, dividing - echoing a constant state of change, unable to grasp the fact that he was suddenly here, at the culmination of all his work.

His fingers slip against the glass as he steps into the entryway. He vaguely sees blonde-tipped hair approach from his right, a slow drawl of a greeting breaking the silence.

“Victor, darling - ”

Victor presses the flat of his palm against Christophe’s face, slurring his speech and tugging at his lips.

“Show me.”

Christophe smiles, bringing gentle hands to the slight of Victor’s wrist and slipping out from beneath his grasp. “We won’t get the images for a couple of days, but late last night we were contacted by LIGO, the Gravitational-wave Observatory - and _Victor_ , the data they sent us - ”

Victor pushes past him, a little too roughly. “Was there any detection of gravitational waves? How slight were they? Even if they’re small we can assume - ”

Christophe pulls at his shirt. “Small? What do you mean _small_?”

And then Victor is face-to-face with the projected graphs, towering over him, practically bringing him to his knees. His eyes follow every curve, every arch, every outlier and pathway - can barely comprehend the distance between the lines, between the numbers -

“Can you believe it? She’s - ”

“ - Enormous,” Victor breathes. He reaches out, drags his fingertips down the screen. “She’s a universe-in-mass, isn’t she?”

“Just what we expected from your theory, no?” Yakov’s voice booms from somewhere behind him.

Victor turns to meet him, the smile he had been suppressing aching against his cheeks. He bounds forward, presses himself into Yakov’s grasp. The older man huffs in surprise, but closes his arms around Victor’s shoulders all the same.

“You’ve done good, Vitya. But remember it’s early still. It’s possible we may not even get any images, that this may be all there is.”

“But she’s alive.” Victor pulls away, turns back to look at the monitor. “The fact that we detected waves at all means she’s moving, colliding with other black holes, absorbing surrounding galaxies.”

Christophe squeezes his shoulder, rubs at the edge of his neck. It calms him, eases the excited tension from his muscles. “Should we get a drink tonight to celebrate?”

Yakov grunts, motions back towards the exit. “I need to speak with Victor privately first. There’s a lot more work to do.”

He feels the release of Christophe’s grip before nodding in agreement, turning to follow. Victor feels both exhausted and cognizant, a drowsy mix that intoxicates every nerve in his body. He wants to hold onto it for as long as he can. He keeps his eyes trained on Yakov’s back as they move through the empty air, listens to the rough of the carpet beneath his feet as they move into a much smaller, windowless room. The chairman’s office is minimalist, harboring only a small pine desk and two guest chairs, both poised in front of an end table displaying the heights of Yakov’s career.

The older man takes a seat behind his desk immediately, motioning for Victor to sit opposite.

“As soon as we get the images from Chile, I want you to start on your mission outline.”

Victor shoots him a puzzled look as he leans back, feels the wooden arms digging against his elbows. “My mission outline? What are you - ”

“Don’t tell me the data you saw just now is enough for you.” Yakov shakes his head, pulls himself close to the desk as he unlocks his computer. “It certainly won’t be for me, or Russia, or the world.”

Victor feels queasy. He had always loved space, the stars - the depth of what the sky could offer. But the idea of trying to control it had always made his stomach churn. “Yakov, what are you proposing I do?”

Yakov lets out a burst of laughter, eyes still trained on his desktop. His fingers are heavy and slow against the keyboard. “Victor, you have been leading this project since you brought it to us. Did you not imagine what would come after?”

“No, but I - ” He cuts himself off, rubs steadily at his temples and leans forward, elbows digging into the ridges of his knees. “I still don’t understand what sort of mission we’d even be preparing for. You said it yourself, this is all we have of Stella and there may not be any more.” He laughs uncomfortably. “Besides, what need would we have to interact with a black hole?”

Yakov stops then, leans back to look at Victor, his eyes serious as he rests his hands over the curve of his stomach. “Who says she’s a black hole?”

Victor blinks. “Those gravity charts back in the control room do.”

What was Yakov insinuating? He knows of the speculation years ago, about black holes hiding wormholes. There had been so much desperation, so much _want_ for the Horizon telescope pointed at the center of the Milky Way - watching, waiting to see if the concept of the universe would change with one single data integrated image.

“I can see you thinking it over,” Yakov tells him. “I know it’s something you considered, you brought the idea to me in the very beginning.”

“You shot it down,” Victor answers stupidly. “You said my original theory was too impossible to begin with.”

He waves his hand dismissively. “I’m in the business of science, I had to try and be realistic for your sake or the committee never would have taken you seriously.”

There’s an uneasy pull somewhere in Victor’s throat. He can feel the pounding of his pulse, pushing against his skin. “Are you taking me seriously now?”

He watches as Yakov leans forward, tilts his monitor slightly so Victor can see. The screen is almost infinitely black, save for a slight arc of blurred white near the center - a rising curve smudged across the darkness, like a thumb to ink.

“Yes,” Yakov answers. “We’re taking you seriously.”

“That’s - ” _Impossible_. Victor swallows roughly, stands to lean over the desk. “What is this? Where did you get this? Chris said we weren’t supposed to get any images for a few days.”

“I asked them to analyze the plasma orbit as well. Separately, of course. I was interested, but I didn’t want you to rely on it as much as the rest of your theory.”

Stella’s plasma orbit. The difference between her identities was magnifying. Wormholes were smaller than black holes, their plasma a smudge as it escaped the pull of gravity, rather than a smear. “But she can’t be a wormhole,” Victor argues, his eyes raking the computer screen as if he might see it change.

“What do you see her as, then?”

_Is that what you want, what you imagine? An entangled black hole?_

Victor knew the basics of entanglement - they had done the research, had discovered that large amounts of it changed the geometry of spacetime and had the potential to create wormholes in the form of black holes - that one could harbor the other. But for something as big as Stella, a potential universe-in-mass black hole, it seemed almost impossible that somewhere inside of all that density there was just a bottomless curve.

The sound of a large file slapping against Yakov’s desk jerks him away from the screen, down to rest between his hands.

“The committee and I have already put together verified individuals worthy of a spot on your team. Choose five.”

——

 

“A wormhole, huh?” Christophe shrugs under the dim lighting, his beer sloshing dangerously over the sides of his glass. “Sure, why not.”

They had been holed up in this bar for an hour now. The entire place was lit up with Christmas lights - there _must_ be a fire hazard in there somewhere - and beneath every tabletop a series of pressed flowers, sunken in beneath the glass. The steady moan of music from the jukebox in the back corner fills the space around their table easily.

“You say that like it isn’t a breakthrough in science.”

Chris furrows his eyebrows. “I thought wormholes already existed?”

Victor rubs a shaky hand down his face. “No, Chris.”

“Oh.” Another shrug. “So have you thought about it then? Your mission?”

“I have a plan, sort of.” Back in the quiet of his office, with the silence ringing painfully against his ears, he’d had no other option than to turn on _Wham!_ and try to process it all. Stella was harboring a wormhole, that much was clear from the image Yakov had shown him. He knew Yakov had intended for his team to be merely a research unit - specialists chosen specifically to launch into the mystery of what Stella could offer them. But Victor wasn’t as close-minded.

“I want to launch a probe,” he starts, “You know, into Stella’s wormhole.”

“That sounds doable, I think.” Chris downs the rest of his beer, pours himself another pint. “Although to be honest I don’t really know much about how that’s done. Wouldn’t that take a while?”

“Right.” Victor can’t meet his eyes, wills the heat in his face to disperse. “The thing is though, wormholes aren’t really stable. General relativity doesn’t allow a wormhole to stay open because all of the matter and energy that Einstein knew of was positive. But if we had _exotic matter_ \- see, that violates all the energy conditions that matter normally shouldn’t. It would have a negative charge.”

“So what, it’d keep a wormhole open?”

Victor nods, pushes his fingers against the side of his temple. “In theory, yes.”

Chris throws back his arms with a smile. “Sounds pretty smart to me. Load the probe up with exotic matter and see where she goes.”

A groan pulls itself out of Victor’s throat. “It’s not that simple.”

“Why not?”

He finds himself fumbling for words because he knows - _knows_ the minute he says it, Chris will refuse him. “Exotic matter isn’t stable either. We know this, we’ve tested it - I mean we’ve used it to aid in other space missions.”

Chris narrows his eyes. “Ok.”

“It has to be handled properly, it can’t just be stuffed into some probe. There are precautions - rules, guidelines, specific properties of applications - ” Victor sighs. “It has to be manually fired.”

“I’m sorry.” Chris pulls forward, his chair screaming across the linoleum floor. “Are you telling me that you want to propose a manned mission to a black hole?”

“A universe-in-mass black hole,” Victor corrects. “Yes.”

He barks out a laugh, sharp and bright, fingers curling into the oily blond of his hair. “You’re fucking crazy.”

Something sharp wedges itself into the space between Victor’s ribs, makes it harder to breathe as he lets the corners of his mouth fall. He listens to Chris as he sinks further into hysterics, waits impatiently for the calm and the clarity to sink in - wonders if that’s something he’s capable of. Victor tries to focus on the condensation from his glass, bleeding into his fingertips and cool against his fervent grip.

“Who is going to be crazy enough to follow you?”

The bar is small, there are too many people, and Victor feels suffocated. He had thought about it - of _course_ he had thought about it. It’s not like manned missions were without risk. But even apart from all that fear, all that danger, it still made Victor feel something akin to bright. He thought maybe it would have been the same for Chris.

Victor sighs, slumping back in his chair and reaching for his cocktail. “I’ve already looked through the people Yakov approved, I’ve chosen most of them already. I don’t think he intended for something like this when he put everything together though, so regardless it’ll be up to them.”

Chris slumps back in his chair. “Fine, humor me then. Who would you take with you?”

He closes his eyes briefly, tries to remember their names with the haze of alcohol clouding his mind. “Sara Crispino from Italy,” he starts. “She was on the team that helped create and test the exotic matter used in previous missions. I want her to do the same for us.”

“Crispino,” Chris repeats, his lips popping around the ‘p’. “She can’t have been the only one who's worked with exotic matter, though.”

“No, but she’s the only one experienced enough in particle physics,” he answers. “No one even came close to her background or dedication.”

Chris nods warily. “All right, who else?”

Victor hums around another name. “Phichit Chulanont, from Thailand. He’s been working with NASA since he was seventeen, worked mostly on time slippage and alternate dimensions. He’d probably know more about Stella than I do.” His tone is teasing, but he’s not sure if he’s joking. “Child prodigy and all that.”

“Sounds like a know-it-all.”

Victor snorts around his drink, rolling his eyes halfheartedly. “Literally everything you know about him fits into one sentence.”

“Fine. So what would he do?”

“Time slippage is probably the most obscure,” Victor sighs. “There’s really only so much we can predict. But he’s more of an expert than the rest of us, so I’m hopeful he’d be able to develop a method to keep us on track. He’s also a physicist, like myself. It’ll be useful to have someone else who can take control of the exotic matter.”

“Ok so we’ve got a particle physicist and a child prodigy.” Chris’ smile is lazy. “Sounds like a sci-fi film.”

He lets himself smile briefly before continuing. “There’s a pilot from NASA I want as well - he’s been on more than one mission, although just in our solar system. Geoffrey Anderson, I think his name was. Either way, he’s got a lot of experience flying bigger ships, which is something we’ll need.”

Chris sways his head back and forth in thought. “And just who are you going to get to build your ship?”

“No idea.” The list of verified engineers had been so boring, practically distasteful. They had all blended together on the page, a blur of similar experience, copied mission statements. “They were all terrible.”

“Suppose there’s got to be room for improvement.” Chris hums and counts off on his fingers. “So even once you pick the engineer, that’s four. Didn’t Yakov ask for five?”

Victor reaches for his drink again. He feels something fragile between them - disengaged. “Well.” He takes a small sip, can feel it dip into the roll of his stomach, nauseatingly slow. “I chose you first.”

Chris splutters around the mouth of his glass, horrified. “On what _planet_ would I even be qualified for something like that?”

He tosses over a couple of napkins nervously, tries to focus his words. “We’ve been working together for years, Chris. We’ve been friends for longer. I trust in you, and I trust in your experience, especially since your physician work targeted the effects of the body in space.” He watches Chris rub aggressively at the spill on the table and hesitates before adding, “We’ll probably be gone a long time.”

“No.” Chris balls up the napkins in his fist. He won’t look at Victor, won’t reveal anything other than the heat in his voice. “You want me to go into _space_? Absolutely not.”

“Oh come _on_.” Victor leans forward, grabs Chris’ hands in his own, sweaty and hot and shaking. “I need you. You think I could do any of this without you?” Chris looks up then, his eyes softening. “Plus, I’ll forget my French if I don’t have someone to practice with.”

“Fuck off.” Victor’s hands are pushed away with a breathy laugh.

“Chris, I’m not joking.”

“About your French?”

“About wanting you with me.” Victor’s smile falters slightly, tense and afraid. “You don’t have to answer me right now, there’s still a lot more I have to put together.”

Chris huffs out a breath. “You’re serious.” His eyebrows pinch together in an effort to piece together the easiness in Victor’s tone. “How can you be serious?”

Victor’s chest tightens in disbelief. “Do you doubt I can pull it off?”

“ _Doubt_?” Chris is tense across from him, his grip against the table’s edge too strong. “Doubt has nothing to do with it, Victor. Are you even listening to yourself? You aren’t talking about collecting data from Saturn or visiting another system to match habitable worlds, you’re talking about a one way trip - ”

“I never said that,” Victor interrupts.

Chris exhales slowly, tilts his head to catch Victor’s wandering gaze, eyebrows raised knowingly. “You’re talking about a one way trip. At least a highly probable one. You know that, right?”

Victor swallows harshly around the question and drops his gaze to the table. He tries to ignore it, the burn in his chest that says the opposite of what he wants to feel. Manned missions were almost commonplace now - the world begging for their knowledge of the unknown to be deepened. Space and matter no longer existed in the same ways and nations began dreaming bigger, brighter, _wealthier_. Potentially habitable planets were no longer out of reach, and harnessing the power of the stars was no longer a dream.

But those parts of space were safe, easy to navigate and even easier to manipulate. Black holes were a mess of unpredictable theory, a question nobody wanted to answer. But Victor wanted to answer her, wanted to understand the complexity of Stella’s existence - and he knew, irrevocably, that a probe would never be enough.

“I’ve never known a life without her,” Victor murmurs. “I know exactly what I want.”

Chris’ grip tightens around his glass. He looks ill, almost, as he watches the swirl of foam dissipate. “Do you even understand what you’re - _fuck_.” A group of girls pass behind him absently, their laughter abrupt and unsettling as they head for the restrooms. “You would ask others as well, to risk themselves for your theory?”

He looks up then, meets Chris’ questioning eyes. “Isn’t that what pursuing science is all about?”

Chris sighs, reaches out between them to connect their hands. His grip is tight, secure, as if he could keep Victor from leaving. “I don’t care about the science,” he says. His thumb brushes the space between Victor’s knuckles, gentle and rhythmic. “You know that.”

Victor is quiet for a moment, allows Chris’ touch to ease away the pain slowly settling itself behind his eyes. “I know Stella doesn’t mean the same to you. It won’t to them either. I just don’t know how to convince anyone beyond the science that she’s worth it.”

His friend stares down at their hands with an odd expression, something forlorn, but unreadable. After a moment, Chris meets his worried gaze with a meaningful look before saying softly, “It’s not that. I just - you need to give me some time to process all of this.”

“You’re saying yes?” Victor’s eyes widen.

Chris shakes his head and sighs. “People don’t follow logic when they agree to risk their lives; they follow inspiration, someone who can lead them. I want to follow you, Victor, but I need time.”

Victor swallows roughly before nodding in agreement. Chris shoots him a warm smile, something to break the awful quiet between them. Then he’s raising his hand, motioning wildly at the bartender. “Fuck. Another round?”

 

——

 

A week later and Victor is meeting with the committee to discuss his mission plans. It takes more than a few days to convince them that risking the lives of six people was the only way in which to attain Stella’s secrets - that the discovery of a wormhole was not just a gain in science, but a gain in history. All they had discovered, all they could possibly know, was minuscule compared to Victor’s findings. 

His mission is approved on a temporary basis, assuming he can put together a team and organize a schedule. There was a lot to process - the time it would take to reach Jupiter at her peak around the sun, the velocity with which they would need to launch in order to meet Stella’s exact coordinates. Even still the bigger question remained - with her mass and time dilation, would this mission even prove useful at all?

Yakov grants him the starting funds and assumes contact with both Sara Crispino and Phichit Chulanont. Within a few days he is cc’d by Phichit on every communicative email - both professional and personal - and they soon inform him that they’re on the way to Roscosmos to begin Victor’s mission.

 _His mission_. Victor feels panic at the thought, but mixed with the excitement it was easier to ignore. Knowing that the real work will start in just a matter of days floods him with a sense of relief, with purpose. Chris’ words had taunted him since that night in the bar, such a simple question that had turned endlessly around in his mind. _Who is going to be crazy enough to follow you?_

Victor’s passion for physics came from its familiarity - it was stable, secure, logical. But it was also breathless, wanting, and desperate. It had urged him far beyond what he thought the universe was capable of, had pulled him past a simple star in the Eridanus constellation - had lulled him into nightmares of what manifested beyond.

He knew that he couldn’t possibly be the only one who felt that way. If Sara and Phichit’s eagerness said anything, it’s that he wasn’t.

“You still need an engineer,” Yakov had reminded him. “They should have been the first one off the list. Building a ship is not quick, easy, or cheap.”

“I didn’t like any of them.”

“I don’t care.” His voice was stern, unapologetic. “Pick one at random, then.”

Victor huffs from where he sits now in front of his desk, pen thrumming against the the shallow of his temple. His mind feels blank and angry. It was childish to be so upset over something like this, but Victor wanted passion, not knowledgeable simplicity.

He drops his head over the back of his chair, closes his eyes against the soft darkness crowding the walls of his office. What even made these people verified, anyway?

Victor pushes himself upright and opens Google on the monitor to his far left. He reaches for the file teetering atop old textbooks and throws it open against his desk, digging through the papers until he’s found the engineers. One by one he types their names into the search bar, looking through pictures and reading through articles, hoping to find someone amidst all the synonymity.

He’s watching an interview with an engineer working in Japan - Celestino Cialdini - and perusing through the comments section when he hears another promising name drift through the speakers. He scrolls back up to the main video, the curiosity stronger than his fatigue.

_“Aside from your other projects, how do you dedicate your time to the space institute?”_

_“I’ve begun mentoring. I know I won’t be around forever,” Celestino voices. “As much as I’d like to be, there are so many talented up-and-coming engineers that need the space I occupy to grow. Yuuri Katsuki is one of those engineers.”_

_“Yuuri Katsuki? I’ve never heard of him. Has he worked on many projects?”_

_“He works primarily as a consultant, gaining the knowledge necessary to start his own projects. Minako Okukawa brought him to me, and I saw his potential right away. Young, ambitious - he’s been chosen recently to head the project for the newest mission Japan has underway - ”_

Victor pushes to a new screen, types _Yuuri Katsuki_ into the search bar with purposed fingers. A few articles pop up, most of them recent, stating exactly what he’d just heard - the up-and-coming twenty-nine year old engineer had made a place for himself in the Japanese space program, ready to take lead on the blueprints for his country’s newest enterprise.

He was young, only a few years behind Victor. Nothing special about his appearance, although Victor supposed the awkward tilt of his blue-rimmed glasses in the program’s official photo was a little endearing. He hums softly, eyelids blinking heavy against exhaustion as he clicks on the first video he can find.

It’s not an interview, Victor notices with slight adversity, but a narration of JAXA’s advancements. He watches with soft, lidded eyes at the way Yuuri works deep in the background. His fingertips shift like water across the blueprints, his eyes an unwavering tide and the color of earth after rain. He watches the changing tilt of his lips, the bend of his wrists as he shapes metal into form, the strain in his tendons harsh against the milky palette of his skin.

Every inch of Victor burns, slow and smooth like a bloom of light and smoke. He clicks to expand the screen, watches as five monitors mirror five Yuuri’s, all in synch, all in tune with the impossible beat of Victor’s breath.

He reaches for his phone and dials for Yakov. The phone rings almost endlessly, impatiently. Victor thinks about just running to his house.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?” He hears on the other end. Yakov’s voice is rough and pained with exhaustion. “I know _you_ can’t sleep, but I - ”

“Yuuri Katsuki,” Victor breathes. He cannot stop watching.

“Who?”

“I want to recruit Yuuri Katsuki.”

There’s a slight pause, a rustle of sheets and what sounds like paperwork. “No idea who he is, Vitya. He’s not on the list. Pick someone off the _list_ , I told you the board won’t tolerate it - ”

“I’ll gather his information, I’ll speak to the board. Just - ” Victor sinks back into his chair. “I’ll convince them, ok? Just add his name to the list.”

Yakov sighs through his earpiece. “Fine, if only because I want to go back to sleep. I’ll call for a meeting tomorrow. Ok?”

“Yeah.”

Victor does not sleep. He instead falls further and impossibly further into Yuuri’s grasp, heady and dizzying, something separate from the dreams and the steady blend of orange forming outside his window. It’s only as he finally pushes to stand, fingers shaking to collect his notes and eyes burning, that Victor finds he’s convinced himself Yuuri will accept.

**Author's Note:**

> Translations:  
> Ty svet - You are the light
> 
>  
> 
> [Come chat with me on tumblr about Victuuri and space!](http://katsuv.tumblr.com)


End file.
